Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  “So the Ages passed from Stone to Bronze to Iron to Roman to Dark to Middle and to Modern. Our friend here has returned to the chalk from which his weapons and his life came. Look at the hole in his skull just by his right temple! It would just fit the edge of the small bronze axe, which you will recall we saw in the British Museum recently. Thus we may reasonably suppose that our skeleton friend is a Neolithic warrior, entombed by the conquering Bronze Age attackers as a sacrifice to their king in his Round Barrow. He was doomed, despite his huge size – as the dinosaur and all brute strength is doomed – by the advance of superior technology in the hands of brainier people. So study, my students, study, and you can safely bury the mass.”

  The voice stops and Gog struggles to move beneath the mesh of grass-roots that ties him down, Gog Gulliver the victim of the Lilliputian archaeologists. But he cannot move or see, and he must lie in dumb stillness, bearing all that Albion must bear. Albion, lying beneath the green skein of nature, Chalk on Upper Greensand on Gault on Lower Greensand on Oolite on Shale on Carboniferous Limestone on Calcite on the most ancient rock of all, Old Red Sandstone. Albion, sunk layer after layer into the crust of the globe and washed about by the cold vein of the sea, while tiddly folk dare to sink shafts and scoops into his pores, while minimal men comment on his innards and past as ignorantly as Miniver comments on the fossil of Gog.

  At last, a whisking irritation unbearably repeated a dozen times rescues Gog from his stonebound nightmare. A volcano of a sneeze looses his rocklike trance, and he wakes with a jerk to find a cow dusting his face with her tail. He shoos her away through the dawn and the grass, ripe with slugs and dew, while he gets to his feet to jog up and down and to warm his blood against the coldness and stiffness that reaches down into his marrow-fat. The old wound in his temple throbs as if the point of a weapon were tapping it in rhythm to his jumping blood.

  Then Gog’s through the grassy plateau of the earthwork, over its southern walls nearly levelled by centuries of ploughing, past tumuli raising their vast bosses of soil above buried heroes, and down a tongue of hill, where the cows have trudged and worked the clayey chalk into floes and troughs fit to break both ankles. At the bottom of the hill lies the town of Mere, and Gog turns into the Old Ship Inn, with the cleaning woman and the manager shrinking back in terror from his gigantic, loamy, smeared and burry shape. Gog takes the talisman against their fear out of his pocket, a green pound note, and he is immediately ushered into a hidden corner of the huge dining-room under the vaulting beams that curve to a central apex. Gog looks upwards from his seat and seems to be beneath a Viking ship, set upside down as a hall for its rowers and plastered between the ribbing of its sides. And Gog wolfs down two breakfasts in a row, one for the inner man beginning to kick infantile within his ribs, and one for the terrifying outer man, whose bulk and bristles scare the other guests as they seep in and hide away from the sight of Gog behind the pages of newspapers, screaming of military victories against Japan and of election victories for Labour and the people.

  On through Mere towards the South-West and the old way to Salisbury across the high downs. At present, the road lies through flat and farm lands. A curious sense begins to come over Gog that Maire has been on the way before him, leaving her signs scattered throughout nature. It is as though she thinks herself a treasure trove, and she has left her true colours behind her as clues to tantalize Gog and tease him forwards in the chase. A black-and-white cat stalks along the hedge with the fearful boldness of half-wild pets; she complains to see Gog, but she will not let him touch her. A herd of Friesian cows chews the cud in a field, blobs of ink spattering the paper of their flanks. A wallow of coaly saddleback pigs seem to have their skin deliberately scraped over their forelegs and front shoulders to show Maire’s cruel white traces. Interminable magpies in ones and twos flick their tails derisively in flight. Within the mysterious intestines of barns, great dark metal guts of abandoned machinery rust away in front of bleached wood walls. Even through a cottage window, Gog can see a loaf and a white bowl of apples set out on a chessboard of oilcloth, while a crow perches on the corner of the black bedroom sill in front of whitewashed bricks. Gog is certainly walking towards London and Maire is there. If she is his treasure trove, then perhaps, like fairy gold in the stories, she will turn to dried leaves and ashes in his hand, blowing away in the wind, leaving him alone at last.

  The old tree-trunks of the telephone poles hobble along the road, their wires keening in the wind and telling runes, mysterious messages only intelligible to the high priests speaking and listening on either end of the cable. And the rain soon adds its counterpoint, driving Gog into a miraculous sentry-box of old red brick, built for wayfarers by some charitable gardener. There Gog rests until the squall is over. Were such providential shelters everywhere beside the road, the whole population would be on the tramp, always progressing towards the joy of never arriving at disappointment. Gog dozes, propped up against the bricks, glad that even Maire seems to have lost her terrors for him now, so he can almost smile at his thought that the haphazard palette of nature might be painted by his wife. As though Maire had invented the contrast between black and white rather than stolen it, as usual, from the creation of God etcetera!

  When the rain has stopped, Gog moves past Huggler’s Hole into Semley. He turns off by the railway tracks tying the village by twin metal bands to London, and he goes into the Kingsettle Inn under the pub sign of a monarch reclining at his ease on a plush throne, his feet resting on a footstool under the roof of a golden palace. Gog himself lounges royally inside the pub on the leather seat of an old oak bench, a pint of bitter and a plate of rabbit sandwiches in front of him. There are a few farm labourers also at the bar, talking weather and plonking dominoes together fiercely, while the pubkeeper has a snub bullseye of a nose and a round-cheeked face fitter than Gog or a board to be the target for darts. Half-way through his midday rest, Gog sees the oldest inhabitant make his entry on two sticks amid triumphal cries of “Joe!” Only two teeth remain in Joe’s right gum, even the skin on his bald head is wrinkled, the hairs sprouting from his ears and nose are white, while his middle is a flannel pumpkin beneath wide grey trousers braced up as high as his nipples. His striped tie and the crested badge on his blue blazer proclaim him a veteran of the Boer or the Crimean War, while his slow shuffle and settling at his favourite chair are hailed loudly as if his entry proved that old soldiers never die and men can live for ever. Seeing Joe’s living denial of death, Gog wonders if death is worth denying at the price of living like Joe. Yet the old man’s belly, now balanced on his haunches as he sits, looks the same as the belly of a woman about to give birth. And Gog feels a little compassion scrub at his heart to watch the very old carrying within themselves the signal of the very new.

  Beer and fatigue make Gog move blindly on, lost in muzzy thinking, through the sunny afternoon. The tick-tock of his pace induces a walking doze, so that hundreds of yards pass by without him taking in their passing. A fork in the narrow lane always jolts Gog back to consciousness because of the need to choose one path rather than the other. Otherwise he would sleepwalk unseeing on past the bracken and trees of the wooded hills, with foxgloves dumbly clapping their bells and bees hung silent in the air with black legs dangling ready for landing and nettles massed in their stinging ranks reserving their green darts against any intruder. But the beer and the sleepiness wear off with the wind on the crest of Semley Hill and with the view of the flat hills ahead across the Nadder Valley, chalk scours and scars and squiggles marking the green flanks of the downs with cabbalistic signs. The sun is suddenly swaddled in dark cloud on this unpredictable day, which reveals the alchemy of the weather only to the initiate, while the rest of mankind must suffer the fair and foul weather as it comes.

  While lying on the parapet of the small stone bridge over the Nadder by Donhead St. Mary, Gog discovers that he is becoming a new man. Without his noticing, his walk has hardened his body and is healing the dark wounds of his mind a
s stealthily as the flesh heals itself unnoticed under the armour of a scab. The stupor induced by his tramping has been a balm to his obsessions. He can feel the outward signs of his inward cure. His stomach has become a series of parallel ridges of muscle between which he can fit the fingers of his exploring hand. His thighs are knotted hard as a tangle of wet hawsers, his calves are two balls almost as tough as skulls, his feet are so inured to walking that they feel only the heat within his boots and not the fiery furnace of trodden tarmac.

  Within such a firm frame almost equal to the condition of a workhorse, there is room to cradle a fresh spirit. The superfluous has been melted away with the fat, the necessary may begin to enter. Proud at the strength of his renewed body, fearful at the first stirrings of something like a soul, Gog looks down at the trickle of the Nadder beneath him to see an external image of spreading peace. Within the banks of the little river where the water runs as steadily as through a vein, a peacock’s tail of green weed spreads itself out in a feathery fan from a point in the middle of the current. The grey light reflected on the ripples glances in a hundred eyes of brightness, so that fire and water and feather and plant combine in a trembling arc of beauty. If Gog seeks a picture of his inner mood, it lies there.

  Yet as he watches, a cloud of midges rises about the spreading weed to make a furious head-in-air. And rain begins to pat his cheeks and crown, reminding him that peace is only a momentary state. Cures do not come at their first sensing; to feel well can be to begin a relapse. So Gog flees on up the steep chalk path that leads to Old Salisbury Way, with the rain like the tongues of the Furies at his heels. He is cheered to pass a wrecked and rusted lorry with its bonnet split open and its engine become a bush spearing out sprays in green silence. But it is Gog’s last cheer before the rain and the high downs plunge him back into his passion for persecution.

  For he’s out exposed on the ridge of the downs now and the rain’s falling in a slant on his front like the Norman arrows at Hastings and drops are pricking their barbs into his whole forward body and wetness spreads over his skin like a seeping of blood and he’s running between the two strands of barbed wire that flank the straight track for mile after mile on the treeless grass and a stone sign mocks at him, XCVII TO HYDE PARK CORNER, XIV TO SALISBURY, 1756, such a flood of a way to go still, and a shard of flint embedded in the chalk cuts into his foot through a hole in his boot to remind him that this is Maire’s country after all, with black slicing edges of stone hidden in the milky clay. Yes, this is Maire’s favourite southland, where the thick-woolled sheep aren’t smut-dark like the northern ones on the moorland. No, the southern sheep are fluffy as whipped cream, their silly ears sticking out sideways like twin handles on a sugarpot. Beware, Gog, beware, the southland manner, the bland beguiling, then the hidden weapon, the smiler with the knife. O yes, the southland is like that, and the weather and the soil made the southerners like that and gave them the victory over the midlands and the northland; a weather of rare storm and much shower and breeze and sun; a soil of high ridges easily fortified, of full living from herds on the plain and vegetables in the valley, of flint weapons springing like dragon’s teeth ready to hand. O yes, by the time the midlands had discovered that their fields had the power of food and the northland had discovered that its mines and factories had the power of iron and coal, the southland had learned all the wily ways of chalk and flint and it coaxed the rest of Albion to curtsy to London, to holiday in the south and spend its brass there, before the provincials went back to the north to labour and wonder how they had been conned and cozened and plucked and packed off penniless home by the soft southland, which now whips Gog along on the barbs of the rain, his sole bloody from the cut of the flint, the victim of the sudden brutality that the southland only shows to prove its easy mastery.

  It’s a long ridgeway that has no shelter, even the Old Salisbury Way, and Gog eventually reaches a large beech grove where the high props of the branches and the irregular layers of the leaves catch the rain before it touches the ground. Gog sinks back, panting in the lee of a tree-trunk, while the heat of his running gradually becomes a soggy warmth and ends as a clamminess. He has to rise and flay the wet clothes off his skin. Once naked, he wrings out his corduroy trousers and red shirt and socks and jersey, jumping up and down like some parody of an almost-­human mechanical mangle. He puts on his clothes again and huddles into the roots of the tree, torn between the need to rest and the need to pump his blood into motion and heat. In the end, the rain stops and the wind soughs on, so that Gog decides to plod through the evening and let his shoulders serve as a drying-rack for his clothing.

  It is nearly dark when Gog reaches another ringed earthwork, Chiselbury Camp overlooking Compton Chamberlayne and the Nadder Valley from the high ridge. The corn is browning, sodden and bowed within the low circles of the ancient fortress; the rationing of modern war has set the ploughshare to till the old place of the sword and feed the many-mouthed warrior island. Gog sits briefly on an iron water-tank, fairly dry and very hungry, but cocky at being tough enough to endure such weather without even a sneeze. The new Gog is a strong Gog, even if he is still forgetful.

  Yet Maire does not forget to leave behind her last and most horrible clue of the day. On top of the green scum in the tank, a bird floats on its back, with long wings and fanning tail spread out in a flat trident’s head of feathered blackness. Yet the centre spoke of the trident, the belly of the bird above the tail, is swollen and split. Within the gash is a crawling curd of maggots, a thousand thousand white worms that make up a tongue of decay among the jet feathers. Gog runs off to shelter in a thicket for the night, his stomach heaving from hunger or horror or fear.

  XXVI

  The morrow is a southland day, with the air as warm and steamy as a laundry and the birds rising at Gog’s approach from thorn and chestnut with the noise of wet flapping towels. It is a day to knead the stiffness from muscles and meander through the cool rinse of the atmosphere, with just enough breeze up to spread the smell of drying leaves and plants everywhere in sharp sweetness. Of course, as the chalk track is in the southlands, it is soggy and treacherous underfoot with deep brown puddles enough to drown a foot in, with lumps of clay and gravel that could break an axle, let alone an ankle. The raindrops stored on the bending blades of the tall grasses soon make a smaller puddle in each of Gog’s boots by way of the swamp on his trouser-legs, so that he walks on water, at first cold and squelching, but soon tepid and moulding his sock and leather uppers to his feet. Perhaps the greatest pleasure of the early morning is to take leave of the ridgeway at last by pissing against a tree, the yellow arch curving onto the lichened bark and the urine running down black onto the black whorls of the roots. It does for a man to make a little water when the sky has made so much.

  It’s the Hoop Side track that Gog goes skating and ski-ing and bob-sleighing down. For Wiltshire summer sports, visitors are recommended to wear on the slopes a filthy jersey crocheted in purled twin-stitch with irregular holes big enough to put your five heads through, a pair of corduroy trousers so mud-caked that the ribbing of the cloth has long since disappeared under a sheen of slime, a red shirt smelling as meaty as a month-old steak, and all-purpose army boots, fitted with ready-slip hobnails which serve as skis and skates and runners without the need to strap on anything else. For cocktail lounge wear, there aren’t any cocktail lounges. For dining and dancing, try picking hips and haws and berries from the briers and hopping up and down to the eighty-piece brass band of the north wind howling through your soaked smalls. No need to reserve places. There’ll be few other fools summer sporting in the Wiltshire rain.

  Down the Cresta lane at sixty inches per minute, a hard turn on the bank of the old tumulus, straighten out of the swerve on the dropping track towards Barford St. Martin (the St. Moritz of the Wiltshire Alps), skid vertical down between the fifteen-foot banks of nettle and thorn, slide between the twin ruts cut deep into the ice-smooth chalk by tractor-sleighs, check and Christie by the
bend, lean into the jump over the five-barred gate, and tumble arse over tip, ski over shoulder, boot over ear, knuckle over nipple, sleigh over foreskin, onto the main road at the foot of the sporting Salisbury slopes of Hoop Side and Burcombe Without.

  Tuck-time at the village shop fills Gog with all the various forms of saccharine-sweet dough that he can find. Not much is off-ration except the artificial and the heavy and the tastelittle; but hunger does not discriminate, and Gog wolfs down fruit pies and wool-filled doughnuts as if they were pomegranates and manna. He even swills down lemonade that is impossible, being both gluey and fizzy at the same time. And Oliver Gog asks for more. His body cannot drink in enough sweetness. With his belly full, he sets off towards Grovely Wood, his heart light and soaring because he has again seen the sign of the previous afternoon’s peace, the peacock’s tail of weed feathering in a large pool of the Nadder, with every plume of green now bearing white flowers. The whole river is solid with petal and weed so that a moorhen jerking on its swim across the pool seems to be walking on a carpet just below the surface.

  Again the feeling of peace does not last. This time, an inner aggression takes Gog back to the wars from which he has just returned. As the pigeons and the crows rise from the hedges at his coming, Gog finds his hands also rising, willy-nilly, and pointing at the birds with fingers outstretched like pistol-barrels, thumbs cocked in a hammer, while his lips explode, “Pow, pow,” left and right, never miss in the mind, though the birds fly away before the eye. Even a blackbird or a thrush scirring upwards from a bush makes Gog’s reflex thrust his fingers upwards, his breath puffing, “Pow,” until he grows ashamed of his automatic habits of slaughter, left over from animal rough shoots before the war and civilized human shoots during it, mow down anything that moves, fire before you see the whites of their feathers or fur or faces. Only by a great effort of the will can Gog stop himself from pretending to aim and fire, so that he may look at the winged and furry things to enjoy their flight or run. Yet even so, the reflex twitches at his hands from time to time, so that he has to drop his half-raised arm and swallow a “Pow” like a belch in his throat. Trained killer that he is, no better than an Otto, Gog tries to learn the ways of truce.